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Title |
A Historical Imagination of the Multitude: Modernity and Theater in Japanese Colonial Taiwan |
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Author |
Wang, Chun-Yen |
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Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, National Chung Hsing University |
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Abstract |
This paper aims to articulate a historical imagination of the multitude, which is yet to be named in scholarship, by looking at local performances of theater during the Japanese colonial period of Taiwan in the 1920s. The paper argues that the multitude who can be found in the local performances exceed the discourse of colonial modernity by looking into the problematic of colonial modernity and historicism. Audiences of Baizixi and Gezaixi serve an example of the multitude that represents different significance from the concepts of“people” or “the masses” under the imagination of modernity of the colonial regime or the colonized intellectuals. This paper argues that the re-articulation of the multitude helps historicize xiqu (Chinese music drama) by re-examining the drama that used to be seen as a particular and apolitical form of aesthetics. It also helps challenge the epistemological rupture between xiqu and xiju (modern drama). |
